[Solved] Gnome-shell text turned to rectangles after botched upgrade

Hi all,

I've run into a problem that I just can't solve, so I was wondering if somebody with a lot of expertise could help out. My system has a couple of stability issues; it freezes up every few days, and I have to make a hard reboot (I think it's related to the video card, but I haven't had the funds to go get a better one yet). The last time it froze was during a pacman upgrade, and I had to reboot. At the new boot, after logging in, all of the gnome-shell letters turned to rectangles (see screenshot), and I had a bunch of other errors. I ran another upgrade Sync with pacman and rebooted; that took care of the errors, but the font problems still remained. The interesting thing is that the gdm window has no problems, I can see the icons on the top right just fine, and the date renders perfectly. It's only when I log in when the blocks occur, and they only occur on gnome-shell panel text (and on everything under Activities).

I have a 32-bit system that's fully migrated to systemd with open source radeon drivers. Here's some output of journalctl for the current boot, with stuff unrelated to the gnome-shell display removed (e.g. NetworkManager, UFW, etc). However, I didn't find any new errors compared to logs from before the upgrade.

I tried using gnome-tweak tool to fiddle around with the fonts, but that didn't help, none of the fonts would render correctly. Cantarell, which I'm assuming is the gnome-shell font, is still in /etc/fonts/conf.avail, so I don't think that the font file itself went missing. I made the fontconfig update a while ago, and that didn't cause any problems.

I also heard that there were problems with xorg-server, so I downgraded xorg-server, pixman, and cairo to their previous versions, but that didn't help either. EDIT: I've also done a pacman -Syyf gnome-shell to try and reinstall gnome-shell. That also didn't work.

I've run out of things to try. If someone else was more familiar with the workings of gnome-shell fonts, or had a better idea of how to debug, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you.

UPDATE: I found that /etc/fonts/conf.avail/31-cantarell.conf existed, but was empty. After doing a pacman -Syyf cantarell-fonts, they went right back to normal!